When the Lights Go Out

  I didn’t wait for her reply. Joey Malone said everyone has a dad, I told Mom as she uncrossed her ankles and set her bookmark between the pages of her book. So where’s mine? I asked, feeling aggrieved all of a sudden. As aggrieved as a little kid can be.

  Mom was keeping something from me.

  Mom had a secret that she wouldn’t share with me.

  Mom’s face turned as red as hot coal. Joey had no right to say that, she told me. Not everyone has a dad. Not you.

  But her answer came with no explanation.

  Maybe he was dead. Maybe they were divorced. Maybe they were never married in the first place. Or maybe I never really had a dad.

  Still, I started snooping around the house to be sure, in case there was something hiding there that I might find. Evidence. A clue.

  A few years later I became more tenacious about it, more annoying. I asked Mom again where my father was. What had happened to him. Is he dead? I wanted to know. I said that word with the testiness of a preteen. The exasperation. Dead.

  But she wouldn’t say. Time and again, she changed the subject; she pretended not to hear me ask. She had a brilliant way of mincing words, of making me forget what I had asked. Of clamming up and saying nothing.

  And yet, again and again, I asked. A hundred times after that. But never did she tell me.

  I became ruthless about it.

  When I was twelve I set a place at the dinner table for him. Whoever he might be. Just in case he decided to show. Mom swiped his silverware from the table post-haste. Flung it back in the drawer.

  Let’s not do this, Jessie, she said.

  I searched city streets for his face. Never sure what I was looking for, but always looking. I wondered if he had blondish hair and dimples like me. Or if he was a brunette, a redhead, maybe even some other ethnicity.

  Maybe we looked nothing alike.

  Or maybe we were the kind that could pass for twins.

  I learned that dimples are inherited. A dominant trait. Meaning only one parent would have to have them for me to have them. And seeing as Mom had none, I easily reasoned that they came from him. From Dad. That, barring some sort of genetic mutation, I’d inherited them from my father.

  What a dimple really is is a birth defect. A short facial muscle that pulls on your skin when you smile, causing indentations in the cheek. My father and I are, therefore, both defected.

  I made up names for him. Occupations. I sized up men with dimples at random, wondering if any of them were him.

  I imagined him with a different wife and kids. Me with half brothers and sisters, a family. In my delusion, every last one of them had dimples.

  Before bed, I’d leave the porch light on, so that he could find our home if ever he came to visit. So that he’d know which one was ours. Which bungalow in a sea of bungalows belonged to me.

  When I was fourteen, I attempted a crop top for school. It wasn’t my thing, bearing my belly button for all to see. But it was a camouflage T, soft and green, and I was fourteen. Feeling rebellious. Trying to fit in with the crowd but failing. Instead I stood out like a sore thumb, always light-years behind the latest fad.

  Mom’s mouth dropped. She shook her head. She said no to the crop top, told me to march upstairs and change. To march. I put up a fight, standing with my hands on my hips, pouting. Sputtering the nonsense of a fourteen-year-old girl.

  But Mom would have none of it. It wasn’t up for discussion, she told me, saying for a third time to march. Pointing at the stairs.

  My words were brisk. I bet that if my dad were here, he’d let me, I said. She looked hurt, visibly wounded. I’d hurt her and I was glad I did.

  Are you ever going to tell me about him? I asked. It was a fair question. I deserved to know, or so my fourteen-year-old self believed I did. I didn’t once consider the reasons she kept him from me, or the ramifications of knowing who he was. But Mom did.

  Qui vivra verra, Mom replied, holding her hands up in the air. Her favorite saying, one that rolled eloquently off her tongue. Only time will tell is in essence what it means, but this time what it was was a way to be evasive. To avoid my question yet again.

  I stormed out of the room. Marched up the stairs and slammed a bedroom door. I put on a sweatshirt that covered every square inch of me.

  Not a year later, the cancer came.

  And then I started wishing I’d never asked about my dad.

  I dwell on those memories now, hating myself for what I put Mom through.

  But every night around 3:00 a.m., when I’ve exhausted all the thoughts of death and grief and guilt for a single night, my imagination begins to take flight. My imagination or my memories, though some nights I have a hard time determining which is which. Tonight it’s a memory, I think, one so far-flung that my brain has to cobble pieces of it together, adding to the gaps so that it makes sense. Filling in the blanks. I see that kindergarten classroom, a poster of the golden rule taped to the cinder block walls. A big bookcase, a rectangular rug with the alphabet depicted on it—the alphabet plus simple pictures, an apple for A, a bird for B—the American flag. A chalkboard with the teacher’s name written on it in perfect penmanship. I see Mom standing there before the teacher, making an introduction, saying to the teacher that she is Eden and I am Jessie, and then the teacher squats just so and reaches out a hand to me and I shake it. Her smile is warm and sincere as she rises back up to Mom.

  Mrs. Roberts stands with the clipboard in hand, making sure each child’s paperwork is complete and that they’ve brought their supplies. Mom hovers self-consciously before her, hands behind her back, fingers laced. Mom and Mrs. Roberts talk and as they do, words reach my ears—birth certificate, I think I hear—and Mom stiffens at Mrs. Roberts’s request.

  “Pardon me?” Mom asks, and Mrs. Roberts explains how there’s a note from the school office that she’s yet to provide a copy of my birth certificate with the other registration materials. A certified copy, with the raised seal.

  Mom doesn’t miss a beat. She says something about a house fire. “We lost everything,” she says, and Mrs. Roberts’s face turns sad.

  “How awful,” Mrs. Roberts says consolingly as I, six-year-old me, asks unsuspectingly, “What fire?” Because there was never a fire. Not in our home. We didn’t lose a thing.

  Mom shushes me. Mrs. Roberts lays a hand on Mom’s arm and says just as soon as she can get a replacement, that would be fine.

  But then, like that, the memory disappears, and I have to wonder if it was a memory at all or only my imagination.

  Tonight as I lie on the mattress in a misplaced belief that if I lie here long enough, eventually I will sleep, I think of a dead three-year-old Jessica Sloane, having to remind myself that it’s a typographical error only, that she doesn’t exist.

  The room is quiet as I lie in bed wondering what she looked like. For three years old, I picture chubby wrists and knees, innocent eyes, an endless smile. I wonder if that’s what she looked like. But then again I remember. There is no other Jessica Sloane. She is me.

  A heavy silence flattens me in bed, filling every crevice in the room like a poisonous gas. I think that maybe it could kill me, that silence. Displacing all the oxygen in the room with a smothering quiet. The only thing I hear is the tick, tock, tick, tock of the wall clock, keeping time.

  I rise to my knees and gaze out the window into the yard, seeing only the back of Ms. Geissler’s home from here. It’s tall and imposing, three floors of limestone and brick. Such a big home for one woman alone.

  There’s a balcony in the back of the home, a basic, rudimentary sort of thing. Wooden scaffolding that soars up three floors, a wooden slab to stand upon. It looks unsafe to me. Unsound. Not up to code.

  As I kneel before the window, I rest my elbows on the sill. Foolishly believing that I blend into the blackness of the room, that no one can see me from here.
The house is dark, except for a single light that’s turned on. A yellow hue fills the margins of a window. The rest of it is blocked by a drawn window shade. I can’t see into the room, just that frame of light around the window shade.

  Ms. Geissler must have forgotten to turn the light off before she went to bed, I rationalize, because it’s the middle of the night, and no one should be awake but me.

  But as I stare, I see that the frame of light behind the window shade is moving, because the window shade inside it is also moving. It’s a gentle back and forth motion, as if a person had been standing just seconds ago behind it, lifting the edges of the shade to peer out.

  I imagine her at the window, gazing out, seeing me lying on the mattress, pretending to sleep. I think of her own admission—I saw your light on late last night—and imagine that last night, like this, she stood at the window, staring at me. Me, who naively obliged, leaving the shades open wide, basic white roller shades that I didn’t once think necessary to pull down.

  But now suddenly I do.

  I watch the motion of the window shade as it slows and then stops.

  And then, like that, the light flicks off.

  The yellow edges of the window disappear. The greystone is engulfed in total darkness. I’d think nothing of it, but then it occurs to me that the light was coming from the third floor of the home. The place with the squirrels. The place where Ms. Geissler doesn’t go.

  She was lying to me.

  Why would she lie to me?

  I crawl back into bed. I throw the covers over my head.

  I make poor attempts to placate myself, to convince myself that the light is on a timer. That it’s automated. That it goes on and off of its own free will. That a heat vent was spewing warm air directly at the window shade, making it move.

  But it’s not so easy to believe.

  eden

  May 14, 2001

  Chicago

  I watch as, beside me, Jessie sleeps. She’s out for the count now—finally, after a long, feverish night—spread out on a blanket on the floor, arms splayed in opposite directions like the wings of a jetliner. Her pale face is placid and calm, unlike last night when it was a fiery red, the fever and the fury creeping up her neckline, inflaming her forehead and cheeks. She’d cried out all night in discomfort, wailing, unable to get a hold of her own breath. Her fever capped at 103 degrees and I was grateful for this, for the fact that it wasn’t high enough to necessitate a visit to the emergency room. I don’t know if I’d have had it in me to go to the hospital had we needed to. I find that the very notion of hospitals—the antiseptic smells, the insipid hallways, the vigilant eyes—still gets under my skin sometimes, like some form of PTSD, I think, because just thinking about being in one rattles my nerves, makes me dizzy, makes my chest hurt. I don’t know that I could ever go back to one, not after what I’ve done. I’m certain they’d see clear through me, that—even with all these miles spread between us—they, the doctors, the nurses, the ladies at the reception desk, would know just exactly who I am, as if I have my own scarlet A forever etched into my shirt as a reminder of my guilt.

  I stare at Jessie, sound asleep on the quilted blanket beside me. Her hair fans out around her face. Her arms, both of them, are thrust upward and over her head now like goalposts. There isn’t a single line on her skin anywhere, and though I don’t want to wake her, I stroke the back of a finger across her tranquil ivory cheek, grateful she still sleeps.

  It takes my breath away sometimes, the way that she looks absolutely nothing like me, but is instead all blond hair and blue-eyed. And then there are those dimples—those dimples!—the most telling of all, so that I’ve tried sucking my cheeks in from time to time in the hopes of replicating them on my own skin. It doesn’t work, of course, and instead of dimples I’m left with a fish face that makes Jessie laugh. There are times I find that I have to remind myself that I am a mother, that I am her mother, and I wonder if others see the hesitation in me, the doubt, or if it’s only in my mind.

  Yesterday as we were walking from the French bakery, the one with the luscious petits fours for which I had a sudden craving, the woman behind the counter wished me a happy Mother’s Day, and there was something querying about it that I didn’t like. It rubbed me the wrong way. What started as a polite greeting turned into a question instead, as if she doubted at that last moment—words already out of her mouth, too late to pluck them back—whether she should be wishing me a happy Mother’s Day.

  Was I the child’s mother? Was I a mother? After all, we looked nothing alike, and of course the lack of a wedding ring raised a red flag. Perhaps I was only the child’s babysitter, her nanny, the au pair.

  As I thanked the woman I saw her turn red with shame, believing she’d misspoken. But I grabbed for Jessie and said, “Come along, my darling girl,” as if that might validate it for both her and me. As if it might make my maternity more real.

  All afternoon I found myself overthinking, wondering what exactly that woman saw that made her question whether I was Jessie’s mother. Was it the manner in which I carried myself, the way I spoke, the lack of a physical resemblance? I thought about it all day and night, wanting to know, needing to know, so that whatever it was, I could next time disguise it better.

  jessie

  The day begins with a cleaning assignment, the first in two weeks. It’s a good thing for more reasons than one. These days, cash is in short supply, and I need something to do with my time. Something better than to obsess over my social security number or lack thereof, Ms. Geissler staring out her window, watching me—which, even by the light of day, still rattles me. So much so that before I leave, I eye the window shades in the carriage home, fully intent on pulling each and every one down so that no one can see inside while I’m gone.

  I slip out of the carriage home quietly, setting the door closed.

  I make my way down the alleyway in back, avoiding Ms. Geissler.

  At 7:30 a.m., I arrive at the home on Paulina, a typical workers cottage. I have to ring the doorbell twice before Mrs. Pugh comes to the door and even then, when she draws it open, there’s a deliberateness about it. It’s not the breezy way she typically throws open the door and welcomes me in. Her voice is out of joint, uncharacteristic of her typical chirpiness. “Jessie,” she says at seeing me standing there. The word falls flat, her eyes dropping to the mop and bucket in my hands, the cleaning caddy stuffed up under my arm. It’s far more than my two arms can carry, so that I feel clumsy though I haven’t dropped anything. Not yet.

  As the sun rises, it lands on the nape of my neck, making it warm, which is a relief from the near-hypothermic way I spent the night in the carriage home. Cold enough to freeze. My teeth chattered all night, body wrapped up in the one blanket I could find. Three pairs of socks on my feet.

  It isn’t so much a welcome. “Jessie?” is what Mrs. Pugh really means, a question more than anything, as if she’s surprised to see me, as if she’s asking why I’m here. She stands before me in a robe and slippers, shielded by the door. There’s no workout attire as expected. No yoga mat and no gym shoes. She must not be feeling well, I guess, because at eight in the morning Mrs. Pugh has yoga, so that by seven thirty, she’s always dressed, hair done up in a ponytail with strands that hang loose and frame her face. But not today.

  “Am I early?” I ask, looking at my watch, which tells me it’s seven thirty. I’m not early because I’m right on time. I hear Mr. Pugh call from the distance, “Who’s there?” he asks.

  “It’s Jessie,” she says.

  “Jessie?” he asks, the tone of his voice equally confused. As if he doesn’t know who I am, which of course he does. I’ve been cleaning their home for years. Every Tuesday.

  “It’s Wednesday,” Mrs. Pugh tells me. “You’re not early, Jessie,” she says. And I can’t make out that expression on her face, but I can see that she’s not happy. “You?
??re a day late. You were supposed to be here yesterday,” she tells me, and it startles me, this sudden revelation that today is Wednesday. That it’s not Tuesday after all, in which case my whole week’s been mixed-up. I wonder what else I missed. I feel groundless all of a sudden, standing high on a ledge with nothing to hang on to.

  My apology is effusive. “I’m sorry,” I sputter. “I’m so, so sorry,” as I try and make my way past Mrs. Pugh and into their home to clean it now, but she stands in my way and says not to bother. “We had friends over last night, Jessie. Parents from the preschool. We needed the home cleaned,” she says as she tugs tighter on the cord of the robe to keep whatever’s inside concealed.

  “I had to find someone else to clean it,” she says as she stares at me, not into my eyes, but somewhere beneath. She raises a finger, points at my chest so that I look down but see nothing. She says, “Jessie, your...” but then her voice drifts off. She reconsiders. Puts her hand down and says instead, “I tried calling you. You didn’t answer.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say again. “I could rake the leaves,” I suggest, though the number of leaves on their lawn is negligible. It’s too early in the season for many leaves to be falling. But I say it so that I’ll have something, anything to do. “Mow the lawn?” I ask, hearing how desperate I sound, but she shakes her head and tells me, “We have a service. They take care of the yard work.”

  “Of course,” I say, feeling stupid. I back away, not bothering to turn and look where I’m going, missing the one concrete step that separates the front stoop from the walkway. One step, a ten-inch rise. I drop straight down, landing gracelessly somehow or other on the balls of my feet, whacking my teeth together in the process. I don’t fall, but the mop slips from my hands, its clang echoing up and down the street.

  I turn to leave, tripping over the mop as I do, and only then does Mrs. Pugh take pity on me. “Our company,” she begins, “last night. Six kids and twelve adults can make quite the mess.”

  She opens the door wider and invites me inside. My thanks is as over-the-top as my apology. It has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with time. Everything to do with keeping myself occupied.